Afghan General: Give Us Engineers and Aircraft, and We’ll Take It From Here

LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — The tip came in at night last weekend. An intelligence source had identified a group of extremists in the Pul-e-Alam district in this eastern Afghan province, just south of Kabul. Without waiting for the U.S. or Jordanian troops stationed at the province’s main base, Afghan National Army Brig. Gen. Muhammad Sadiq personally rallied the green-camouflaged troopers of his 4th Brigade, part of the Afghan 203rd Corps. Roaring into the district in their Humvees, the Afghans engaged a firefight that killed nine insurgents.

David Axe spent six weeks in Afghanistan, on the war’s dangerous and largely forgotten eastern front.See Also:

Three days later, Sadiq slouches in a folding chair next to a newly-planted garden outside his brigade command post, sipping green tea and swapping jokes with some of his staff officers plus two American visitors. The tanned general with the wicked comb-over has a message for the Americans. His brigade could use more engineers and air support. Otherwise, the Afghans are pretty much ready to go it alone in Logar. “We are able to do every kind of operation,” Sadiq boasts.

There are other caveats, too. Fuel, for one, is a big problem for the Afghans. The 4th Brigade has struggled to get adequate gas consignments from their logisticians.

Plus, it’s not clear that Sadiq’s brigade could, all on its own, cultivate and mine the intelligence sources necessary for quick-reaction operations like last weekend’s.

Finally, there’s the issue of capability versus capacity. Even if the average Afghan battalion is ready for action, are there enough battalions to secure the whole country?

All the same, Sadiq’s got a point. After $27 billion in foreign investment and a decade of intensive training by the Americans and other coalition forces (on top of its pre-9/11 combat experience), the Afghan National Army is pretty much ready today to take the lead in some parts of Afghanistan.

It’s a reality that NATO and the Afghan government both acknowledge. On Tuesday, Afghan president Hamid Karzai announced that four cities and two entire provinces — Bamiyan and Panjshir — would come under exclusive Afghan control in July, the same month the U.S. is slated to begin its planned four-year withdrawal from the country.

So what about those caveats? Sadiq swears they’ll master fuel logistics “this year.” Intelligence operations might not come so readily, however. And then there’s the question of who will find and get rid of all the bombs.

Engineers are needed for the ceaseless task of clearing Logar’s roads from deadly buried bombs. Today, that task falls to the U.S. Army’s 541st Engineer Company and similar units, plus U.S. and Czech Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams. The first Afghan engineers are slated to join the 541st in coming months, Capt. Brandon Drobenak said last week. The Afghans will possess only basic equipment — Humvees and metal detectors, mostly. But that should suffice, Drobenak said.

Sadiq seconds Drobenak’s assessment, and adds an important qualifier. Sure, with the planned reinforcements the Afghans will be able to clear the roads like the Americans do — but at the cost of more engineers’ lives. Where the Americans and other NATO contingents meticulously isolate a suspected bomb and call in robots, the Afghans are more likely to just cut any visible wires and hope for the best. When it comes to Improvised Explosive Devices, “the coalition is very careful,” Sadiq admits. “We’re not.”

Air support poses different problems. The Afghan Air Force is on a slow ramp-up from today’s roughly 60 choppers and airplanes to a planned total of 154 aircraft by 2016. NATO, by contrast, can call on literally thousands of aircraft belonging to a dozen nations. Today, a U.S. Army brigade task force in charge of a single province might possess as many aircraft as the entire Afghan military — and any one of the Americans’ planes is far more sophisticated than anything the Afghans have planned.

That’s a capacity gap that will long plague the Afghan army — and one Sadiq laments. “If I had an air force here, I could arrest the enemy every night,” he says, scowling into his tea.

Arguably the greater capacity gap is in the 150,000-strong Afghan army itself. The Defense Ministry in Kabul wants an additional 100,000 troops by 2013 — a boost that could stretch the army’s recruiting and training systems. It’s not for no reason that NATO is trying, for at least the sixth time, to cobble together local militias to patrol remote villages. There just aren’t enough fully-trained troops to go around.

So Sadiq might be right. If he doesn’t mind losing engineers at a tragically high rate, if he gets a handle on fuel supplies and as long as NATO continues providing air support and intel, the Afghan National Army might be ready to take over … Logar province. Omitting Bamiyan and Panjshir, that leaves just 31 more provinces to go.

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